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Apple changed the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America on the web version of its Apple Maps following U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the lake.
The move by Apple on Tuesday followed a decision by Alphabet late on Saturday to change the name of the lake on its Google Maps for U.S. users.
Apple confirmed that U.S. users will see the label “Lake America” following a change to the body of water’s name in the U.S. Geographic Names Information System. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum had told Fox Business on Monday that Trump “reached out to Apple directly” about the renaming.
Users in Canada will continue to see Lake Ontario, and users in the rest of the world will see both names, following the same approach Apple used after Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
Google’s switch caused some confusion in Canada over the weekend, with some companies and government organizations briefly showing maps using the Lake America name on their websites.
Lake Ontario now appears as ‘Lake America’ on Google Maps in the United States, but also on some Canadian federal and provincial government websites that use Google’s API for their maps.
New York sides with Canada
The name changes illustrate how U.S. tech companies are being pulled into geopolitical disputes as the Trump administration pressures them to comply with executive orders that allies and international bodies have rejected.
Trump’s executive order on Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes of North America, applies to U.S. federal usage for the lake, and does not govern what Canada, international bodies or other organizations call the lake.
A majority of Americans oppose Trump’s moves last week to raise taxes on imported Canadian goods and his order to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Within hours of Trump’s executive order, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said they would not be changing the name, which is more than 400 years old. New York borders the lake on the U.S. side.
About 52 per cent of the surface area of Lake Ontario is in Canada, with the remainder in New York.
Historian Tim Naftali says U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to rename the American side of Lake Ontario was intended to stir nationalist sentiment in the U.S. and provoke Canada.
Since early 2025, Trump has repeatedly taunted Canada about becoming the 51st U.S. state, an idea Canadian leaders have dismissed as ridiculous.
Trump also ordered the Gulf of Mexico renamed to Gulf of America in January 2025 and both Google and Apple revised their map apps to reflect the change for U.S. users.
